


still your hand, still your heart

by Ponderosa (ponderosa121)



Category: Prodigal Son (TV 2019)
Genre: Anal Sex, Blood, Daddy Issues, Dark Character, Date Rape Drug/Roofies, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Dreams vs. Reality, Hopeful Ending, Immobility, Incest, M/M, Masochism, Memory Loss, Mommy Issues, Parent/Child Incest, Rape/Non-con Elements, Sexual Coercion, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-26
Updated: 2019-11-03
Packaged: 2020-12-28 20:02:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 4
Words: 12,828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21142397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ponderosa121/pseuds/Ponderosa
Summary: Malcolm doesn’t have difficulty identifying with a victim. If anything, that’s the problem. Thinking like a murderer is easy. Thinking about being at the mercy of one is easier.aka The one where Malcolm goes to Claremont, sets a trap for Martin, and learns to be okay with his own dark needs.





	1. the shadow of a suggestion

**Author's Note:**

> Mind the tags and please let me know if there's anything I ought to add for content warnings. Additional content warnings for chapter 1 include a rape victim at a crime scene and non-graphic mention of vomiting.

As with everything, fear begins with a suggestion. Less than that: the mere shadow of a suggestion. A flicker of a thought. A potential.

_“Your woman in the box.... Ask yourself this, my boy: How did she feel?”_

He’d left Martin twisting idly in his chair, smiling faintly, _charitably_. The whispered question clings to Malcolm as he flees the hospital and sinks into his skin by the time he slides into the back of a waiting car. He can’t rid himself of it during the drive, and it saturates the whole of him as he stumbles to the curb--_home, he’s made it home_\--and fumbles his keys with hands that won’t cease their trembling.

To get his traitorous, useless fingers to work each step is best approached as an individual task: slot the key into the lock, turn it, retrieve it, open the door, move past the threshold, climb the stairs, rinse and repeat.... He manages, staggering into his studio and hastily latching the door behind him. It takes longer to still his hands enough to slide the chain, a petty response to his mother forcing him to cut her a new key. Bothering to secure the door is such a small act of defiance, but it makes him smile, teeth bared and a breath away from something dark and squirming-- What is it? Fury? Sorrow? He’s not sure where he stands with her after their latest spat; old habits are as difficult to break as her drinking habits.

He winces, pulls himself away from that confusing twist of emotion and stares at his hand: a five-pointed origin of the shiver that travels up his arm and along his spine. There’s an echo of breath at his ear seductively laden with secrets. _My boy. How did she feel?_

He shoves his father’s voice out of his head, but he can’t lose the questions. What had Martin meant by it? Is he supposed to try and empathize with her? Malcolm’s sudden, sharp laughter echoes in the studio. Doesn’t Martin know his son’s not broken like _that_? Isn’t it obvious to him that Malcolm doesn’t have difficulty identifying with a victim. If anything, that’s the problem. Thinking like a murderer is easy. Thinking about being at the mercy of one is _easier._

Malcolm runs his hand over the countertop, the stone cold and smooth, unmarred but for a minor chip that prompts his mother to complain and say he ought to replace it. She’s always so quick to throw things out; to banish them if they reveal their flaws. Except him, of course. She’d love for him to be repaired, but until then, she’d rather have him hidden away.

His smile returns, bloodless and cruel. She’d never say it, but he wonders if sometimes she’d like to tuck him in a box in the basement where he can’t disappoint her or embarrass her any further.

Malcolm traces the surfaces on his way to his bed. Most everything is cold and hard and unforgiving until the sleek coolness of his bedding slides like water under his palm. He collapses into it, curling onto his side. His limbs fold around themselves, cradling his chest, the steady beating of his heart. He extends an arm, hears his father’s voice again, so sharp despite the age of the memory: “Be gentle, Malcolm. Gentle.” Martin’s hand, broad and warm over his own as it guided him. The dig of Martin’s thumb pressed against the heel of his own like Malcolm was a scalpel. Precise. Purposeful. Then the slow push and spread of his fingers into a dog’s soft black fur.

He stretches his fingers across the coverlet, pale on dark. Imagines for a moment Martin's there to direct him. “Gentle,” Malcolm says, mimicking his father’s tone. “You don’t want to hurt it, do you?”

He makes a fist. Not because he’s shaking, but because he doesn’t know the answer. Whether or not he wanted to hurt the dog is one more fucking thing he can’t remember.

*

If fear begins with the shadow of a suggestion--a _potential_\--it spreads in much the same way.

He dreads the phone weighted in his pocket. Martin’s calls have become commonplace, and it’s no longer the idea of his father’s voice tinny from the shitty hospital landline that makes his stomach sour with acid, it’s knowing what comes later.

The greasy, aimless _yearning_.

Gil looks his way and jolts Malcolm out of the fog that’s swept over him. “Well, what are we looking at?” he asks.

“Escalation. He’s a thrill seeker.” Malcolm steps away from the body bent over a chair. It’s oddly graceful the way the woman’s limbs hang and her hair spills down in long waves. His stomach pangs with sympathetic hurt picturing the hard wooden edge of the chair's back digging into the softness of his gut and the wings of his hipbones. “Someone just graduated from sadistic rapist to murderous sadistic rapist.”

“This is the work of a sadist?” Gil questions. He gestures at the state of the victim: no visible wounds and her clothing arranged to preserve modesty.

“She’s here because of the window. It’s not a coincidence, the killer selecting this particular room and that particular view,” Malcolm explains. He flicks the blinds, turned just enough that the children playing in the yard wouldn’t have been able to see their mother’s distress. “Did you see the mail and the stuffed animals? I don’t think the neighbor is our suspect and our victim was probably here to bring in the mail and water the plants.

“Based on the toys and those books on the shelf, I’d say she and the kids were frequent visitors here,” Malcolm goes on. “I think our rapist wanted to violate her in a space that should’ve felt safe, but where they wouldn’t be interrupted by say...one of the kids coming in for a glass of water.”

“That’s why she didn’t fight back,” Dani says grimly.

“Screaming or calling for help would’ve put her kids at risk.” Gil scowls and Malcolm can feel how much he loathes the perpetrator. “So you’re saying he forced her to stay quiet while he did that to her.”

Extending his arm out, Malcolm points his fingers. Sights down them. Sees at his fingertips where the victim would have been gripping the arms of the chair in silent misery. “I’m thinking a gun to the head was an additional motivator until he got too excited and snapped her neck,” he says. He steps back to shake out his hand and rub at the back of his head to rid himself of the phantom feeling of a muzzle pressed there at the base of his skull. “This guy invested a lot of time into the fantasy of our victim and her family.”

Malcolm’s helping flesh out the profile back at the precinct when Martin calls.

“There was a sexual assault involved wasn’t there?” Martin inquires, pitching the question somewhere between smug and excited. A television gone to commercial murmurs in the background and Malcolm picks up the creak of his chair as he leans back; Martin had probably crossed a leg, palms settling on his thighs. “The media is playing coy for now, but pretty soon they won’t be. The ratings draw will be too much to resist.”

“I don’t have time for this.”

“You sound tired, Malcolm. This case clearly has you all wound up--hmm, which means it’s not physical restraints then, but something more troubling. Ohhh, of course...the neighbor’s house…. It would have a perfect view of where her children were, wouldn’t it.” Martin follows the logic and Malcolm’s strained silence like breadcrumbs. “Cruel to use a parent’s love for their child as a weapon.”

“I have to go.”

“He’ll have made contact with her before committing the act. Several times probably. Maybe in the guise of a courier or a friendly utilities worker.”

“Goodbye, Martin.”

Malcolm winces as he hangs up. Seethes a bit at the way he immediately wishes that he hadn’t. If he could park himself on a cement floor with a folder open on his lap and work through the rest of the case with Martin it’d be so much quicker. Gil and JT and Dani, they’re all smart, but they can’t orient their thinking in the right direction. They’re always playing catch-up.

They’re forever on the chase, not the hunt.

*

Malcolm spends the next week doing the latter. He sifts through witness statements to build up a profile to fit the sort of woman the killer sought out, works with Dani to track down where the perp might have first come across the victim, and eventually Malcolm has enough to anticipate which neighborhood they’ll find him in and why. 

In the end, utility worker’s uniform is annoyingly the right angle. Still, it’s case closed before the guy has a chance to strike again, and the creep certainly had plans to. They catch him with a camera full of photos and when they search his apartment, the walls are a collage of the women he’d been actively surveilling.

Malcolm carries that image home with him--the assemblage of seemingly perfect families--a rainbow of smiles with fathers away on business and the kids left in the care of their loving mothers. Martin used to be away “on business” quite a lot. Subsequently Malcolm had been left to his own devices quite a lot.

Speaking of, the case has kept him occupied enough that he hasn’t thought much about the question that had been haunting him before. He realizes that summoning up the sound of Martin asking _”How did she feel?”_ no longer elicits such a visceral reaction. Malcolm can observe the phrase from a distance. He turns it around in his mind like a Rubik’s Cube, trying to work out the steps Martin had taken before handing the puzzle to him.

He eats a meal mechanically, hardly tasting each bite it as it passes from his fork to his mouth. It’s only when he’s done and sliding the plate into the sink that he stares down at his hand poised and gripping the china.

“She was warm,” he says aloud, and the plate falls into the sink with a clatter. He stares at his palm, the lines threaded there across a map of thin blue veins. It looks like a stranger’s hand, familiar only in the broadest strokes. “Alive or very nearly.”

Immediately, he vomits, empties his stomach until he’s heaving and gasping and desperately rinsing his mouth under the tap. At least it’s easy to clean up, he thinks as he spits, and grips the edge of the sink as the water washes everything away.

Groaning, he bends forward and rests his forehead against the crook of his arm.

If only he could tell someone about this newest revelation, but everyone seems to want him to set it aside and forget the woman, whoever she was. Even Ainsley who’s generally been a sympathetic ear will tell him to “stop obsessing” and circle around to suggesting that he’ll never excise his night terrors by dwelling on them.

So he lets this new information tumble around in the cavern of his mind for the rest of the night until the rough edges wear away and he’s left with a shiny little pebble to bring with him into bed. _She was warm_, he thinks as he secures the cuffs, and he drifts to sleep while picturing himself seated in the corner of Martin’s cell, the cement beneath him as cold as a basement floor.


	2. a flicker of a thought

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “This is what you want isn’t it? You and me, together...Dad.”
> 
> The word and the brush of his mouth opens a wound, the kind so sharp and so sudden that the body forgets for a moment to bleed.

Malcolm spends the following weeks newly haunted by something his father had said: _Cruel to use a parent’s love for their child as a weapon._

This is not fear that’s found and follows him, but it is the shadow of a suggestion. A flicker of a thought. The more consideration he gives it, the less his hand persists with its incessant, inconvenient shaking. He is rightfully concerned.

Gil notices--there are precious few things that Gil doesn’t take notice of--but in a grave error in judgement categorizes this development as a good thing. He goes so far as to clap Malcolm on the shoulder with a paternal squeeze and praise him for making more time for therapy.

Malcom grins and lies convincingly though he hasn’t stepped foot in her office once.

He has, however, gone to visit Martin several times.

Each time the shadow’s grown until Malcolm is wearing it like a cloak because the fear--the real immediate and inescapable fear--_that_ lives with Martin. Malcolm had seen it there on his first visit, and he knows the signs of it now intimately. The power of it is a red-hot hook in Malcolm’s belly, a sizzle like fat in a hot pan. The mere hint of it now is enough to make his mouth go wet and his insides quiver. His dreams lately, they’ve been--

“How long do you think it will be before I get tired of this?” Malcolm asks before his mind can turn towards those new, awful images and feel their phantom fingers creep across his skin.

“Visiting?” Martin asks mildly.

“This game of yours. Waiting around for answers that you might not ever give me.”

Martin’s mouth pulls downward briefly. “Oh,” he says, and the faintest shift in his arms suggests he’d like to reach out towards Malcolm, “maybe a year if I’m lucky.”

“Do you consider yourself lucky?”

Martin’s smile is broad and warm and very convincing. “Well, I get to see my boy, so I’d say that I am.”

A half-step forward and Malcolm would be close enough for Martin to touch. He shifts an inch towards that temptation, feels the charge that surges between them. When he instead pivots and leaves without another word, Martin’s fear is a looming, monstrous thing, but Malcolm’s newly ever-present shadow stretches out very far behind him to consume it.

*

He dreams of running his hand through a dog’s soft dark fur. It’s long, impossibly long. And before he wakes, he realizes it's no longer a dog at all.

*

Malcolm discovers two more things that horrify him: that it takes less zeroes than he’d expected to buy a remarkable level of privacy at Claremont and, once he’s stood outside his father’s cell, that he hasn’t come up with a good enough reason to keep him from going inside.

He grasps the handle of the door and gives himself one last chance to leave. He doesn’t. The day’s card had read: _I am powerful. I create everything around me._

“I am powerful,” he whispers, and enters.

“Malcolm, what a surprise,” Martin says. He slides a finger in his book as a marker and looks past Malcolm to the empty stretch of the hallway. His gaze flicks to the cameras where the red little lights have gone dull and dark. “Are you finally springing me from this joint?”

When Malcolm doesn’t answer and doesn’t cross the painted line, the mischief fades from Martin’s eyes and he sits up straight and puts his book aside. “What’s going on, Malcolm?”

Malcolm nearly laughs. “Well it’s not a jail break, I can tell you that.”

“I do love our chats, but cameras off is new. Is something wrong?” he pats the bed. “Come on now, tell daddy everything.”

If only. The sharp intake of Martin’s breath when Malcolm steps past the safe zone triggers a pure chemical rush in his blood; the adrenaline carries Malcolm across the room until his hands fold into Martin’s cardigan and he’s looking down at his father. Large and looming. A reversal of everything they’ve been until now.

Martin is deathly still. On the outside anyway. The whites of his eyes say he’s fighting within himself to understand if Malcolm is a threat and intends him harm, or if there’s a flicker of hope that this really is a plan to help him escape. It makes it all the better--_all the worse_\--when Malcolm leans down to press their foreheads together and that stillness draws to the surface a familiar trembling.

Only it’s not in _his_ hands. It’s Martin who shakes as he reaches up disbelieving to embrace his son.

“Are you sleeping enough?” Martin asks softly. His hand strokes down Malcolm’s spine to rub a small circle at the low of his back.

“My dreams lately…they’ve been different. I haven’t dreamed about the box for a while now,” Malcolm confesses. His hands twist in the softness of Martin’s sweater, body heat rising and bringing with it the warm smell of soap he recognizes as coming from a little shop in Bermuda. The hand-cut bars his mother used to favor had come wrapped in thick layers of tissue and sealed with a stamp of wax. “I’m not sleeping well, but I _am_ sleeping.”

“Well that’s good news, isn’t it?”

“I don’t think it is, Doctor Whitly,” Malcolm says. He smiles weakly and puts a palm to his father’s cheek, pulls back enough to see the flicker of Martin’s gaze dance across his face. He licks his lip and a shining scalpel forged of syllables waits behind his teeth. “Martin…,” he says, and there’s an apology hidden there somewhere, the sort that he’d never gotten.

“Malcolm wha--”

“Sssh,” Malcolm says. “This is what you want isn’t it? You and me, together...Dad.”

The word and the brush of his mouth opens a wound, the kind so sharp and so sudden that the body forgets for a moment to bleed.

When the blood spills, it’s an angry shouting snarl and a shove against his chest. “What the f--”

Malcolm surges and kisses Martin harder, the weight of his body behind the crush of lips, the click of teeth. He smothers the protest to nothing with the touch of his tongue. “I know…,” Malcolm says, manic and gasping for a full breath of air. The ache of Martin’s hands on his ribs trying to hold him back hesitates, easing a touch. “Awful isn’t it. If you push me away then I leave and I don’t come back. If you don’t, then, well...” He shrugs a shoulder, runs his knuckles down Martin’s chest where the beat of his heart reverberates. He flips his hand to press his palm there and measure the way it turns frantic like the fluttering of a trapped bird.

“Why are you doing this, Malcolm?” Martin’s measured tone carries just the hint of admonishment, not enough to dissuade or put Malcolm on the back foot again.

He stands up and looks down at his father. “Honestly?” he says, and shrugs out of his suit jacket. He tosses it onto the chair waiting at the desk. He runs his hands through his hair and the strands fall immediately back into place, refusing to be disturbed. His smile is wide and giddy and he is in this very moment truly alive for the first time in what feels like years. “I have no fucking clue.

“I really can’t tell you when the idea first came to me,” he goes on, shaking a finger towards the ceiling as he rounds back on Martin. “Only that you’re the one who gave it to me. Not directly, of course. Abstractly. And I know-- Oh, I know it was never like that between us. For the most part you really were the perfect father.”

“Are you on any new medication?” Martin shifts carefully, foot moving to bear weight and prepare him to stand quickly if needed. To _run_.

Malcolm tracks the motion like a bird of prey, his head cocked to the side. Open, his cuffs dangle at his wrists. He barks a laugh. “That would be convenient wouldn’t it? No, Martin. Just the same old cocktail of prescriptions, but look,” he says, and holds up his hand to display it’s remarkable stillness. It doesn’t shake until he makes it shake and Martin’s expression darkens. “You’re right to worry. It stopped the minute I decided this right here was the end of the line, so answer me some questions and maybe that’ll satisfy.”

“You want to talk about the girl--?”

“No!” His own answer surprises him a bit. He masks it quickly, but surely Martin had seen. “I have a new question: Did I ever want to hurt that dog?”

Thrown for a loop, Martin’s brows pull together and he stumbles over his words. “What dog? Malcolm, what are you talking about?”

There’s a blur in Malcolm’s mind as dreams and memory overlap. _Be gentle, Malcolm._ Dark hair...dark fur...dark and shining eyes. She’s warm, the new phantom woman, but she’s hardly breathing. “Okay then…. Did I ever meet any of your victims?”

“Yes, but--”

“Did you make me kill one of them?”

Martin grows agitated, thrown literally off-balance as the weight moves away from the ball of his foot. “Of course not, Malcolm! You were just a little boy.”

“Old enough to be drugged and put to bed, to go fishing in the woods and learn how to hold a rifle and gut a deer, but not old enough to help you in your...work.” Malcolm’s shirt is open now, sliding from his shoulders and Martin is torn between looking away and narcissistic curiosity. How alike are they? Malcolm had gotten the soft sweep of his mother’s hair, but how much of Martin’s genes are visible in the lines of Malcolm’s body. “That’s what you want from me now, though isn’t it? For me to help you get out of here and make up for lost time. You want to _really_ teach me a thing about murder.”

“I can’t deny it, the thought has been on my mind.” Martin makes a disgusted face. He turns his gaze, but it flickers back again, cataloging the faint scatter of hair high on Malcolm’s chest. The narrow line down his belly. The hang of his cock, fattened a bit by the thrill. He looks away again as Malcolm advances. “Are you operating under the assumption that this repulsive act will ruin the fantasy of everything we could be together?”

“No.” Malcolm sheds the rest of his clothes along the way and lays himself down on the bed. Unsurprisingly, it’s more comfortable than it ought to be. He fingers the restraint snaking from the low of his father’s back. “I’m betting that you’ll enjoy it, or you’ll learn to. Because if you don’t fuck me, when my time is up the cameras are going to turn back on. And we both know that after the guards drag me out of here naked, bribe or no bribe, I’ll never be allowed back in to see you. Simple as that.”

“You stupid boy,” Martin snaps, his anger hitting its boiling point. His face contorts for a moment in a soundless snarl. His fist clenches. There are many ways this can go. The shadows breed potential, spitting out futures born of fear or violence or cruelty. The Surgeon has never been more trapped and he knows it. He draws in a calming breath, but Malcolm can see the terror has sunk deep inside him with the knowledge that his son is right. “What makes you think I’ll even be able to get it up?”

“I didn’t say you had to penetrate me, _dad,_” Malcolm points out. “Semantics aside, we both know the minute I start talking about murder you’re going to get aroused.”

Malcolm rolls to his side and props his head on his hand. This is more satisfying than he’d thought it’d be. He’s spent so long worrying that everyone was right, that he has too much of his father in him. And yes, he’s enjoying the control, but no one innocent is getting hurt and he’s never, never going to do what Martin wants.

“So my dreams,” he says, “do you want to know how they go? It’s a lot like this. Me, in your cell and naked in your bed. Only there’s a body beside me, still warm, still breathing but barely. She has dark hair, almost black, and she smells like rubbing alcohol.”

“Malcolm, please. I’m your father.”

“The smell is almost stronger than the smell of blood. It’s pooling under her, spreading towards where I’m laying. If I turn my head, she’s looking at me. Watching. She’s lost too much blood so technically she’s already dead, she just doesn’t know it yet. This is when you get on top of me and spread my legs and kiss me.”

“Malcolm!”

“She’s suffering. Begging me to help with her eyes while your mouth is on my throat and your co--”

“Malcolm, stop!”

Martin flees to the end of his tether. The whole of his body is shaking and Malcolm can’t read whether it’s rage or lust or that ugly mix of both that fuels so much of the horror he comes across week after week.

He’s pushed Martin too far. Sees it in the slope of his shoulders.

Fuck. Malcolm rubs his hands over his face. He slinks out of the bed and gathers up his clothes. He dresses hastily and bites his tongue to keep from apologizing.

If he does that, he knows he’ll have lost--the game, maybe himself--forever.

*

Later, when he dreams it, Martin doesn’t hesitate. Martin caresses his face and calls him his beautiful boy and slides into him with ease, like his body has been made for this purpose. Fucks him so hard that the bed striking the wall causes cracks in the plaster. Malcolm’s limbs are leaden and he can’t lift them, he can only turn his head to watch the woman dying beside him.

He takes his pills and reads the day’s affirmation: “I will interact with others around me based on what is right for me. The solutions I seek will be clear to me because I am my authentic self.”

Malcolm runs the edge of the card across his lip.

The ugliness of what he’s done--what his _authentic self_ still wants to do--clings to him and Malcolm takes a shower so hot it leaves his skin red and stinging. The stain of it on him never quite washes off, even when his come goes swirling away.

He almost misses the fear.


	3. a potential

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In Malcolm's new morning ritual he doesn’t seek out a new card after taking his pills, he just taps the one on the wall like a reminder, an unfinished task.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Added a chapter since I wasn't able to post before 1x06, and then I couldn't NOT add a sub!Malcolm scene in this. So, this one includes a brief non-graphic sexual encounter with Daddy kink.

The next case is a kidnapping gone wrong. Following it is a sexual assault. Then it’s a string of very clever murders that puts everyone on edge aside from Malcolm, who is elated, which of course leads to a reintroduction of the sort of tension between him and the team he’d thought they’d gotten past. So much for interacting with others based on what’s right for him.

“You should take a week off, maybe two,” Gil says. He fiddles with his wedding ring. It’s not a suggestion. 

“What am I supposed to do?” Malcolm asks. He’s not being facetious. He’s sleeping quite a bit more in the scheme of things, but the last time he’d been left unoccupied for a while the insomnia had come raging back and he’d begun hallucinating. With the kinds of dreams he’s been plagued with lately, if they choose to manifest in the middle of the day he’ll be at risk for a public indecency charge. He bites his lip. That’d be a little harder to cover for than jumping at shadows.

“I don’t know, Malcolm.” Gil looks pained and shares a glance with Dani before gathering up his focus again and squaring his gaze on Malcolm. He puts a hand on Malcolm’s shoulder and steers him towards the door. “Why not get outside the city. Take a hike, go fishing, fly to Maine on the family jet and eat some lobsters, just...take a break.”

Malcolm aches to say something, to explain why maybe a week in the woods upstate might not be the best way to keep him on this side of sanity, but Gil’s already closing the door on him. Palms going clammy he starts to turn, desperate to go back in and convince Gil to reverse course and let him stay, but Dani gives him a sharp warning shake of the head and reluctantly, Malcolm stops himself; he can’t risk pushing too far, not like he had with Martin. He can’t jeopardize his relationship with Gil when everything else has become so tenuous.

The despair must show on his face because Dani takes pity on him and walks with him to the elevators. Or maybe it’s just to ensure that he really leaves the station, but either way, at some point she decides she’s driving him home and won’t take no for an answer.

They don’t talk in the car. It’s awkward. Malcolm rests his head against the window and takes in small sips of breath. His skin is too tight, his heart racing. The shadow that had grown faint for a time is pooling now in the footwell, leaking out of him like ink. He clenches his hand so hard his nails dig into his palm. There’s still no hint of a tremor.

When they come to a stop, Dani twists to face him. “You’re good at what you do, Malcolm. Very good. But you….” Her grip tightens on the steering wheel and her eyes shift as she tries to find the right thing to say. “You get a little scary you know.”

“I need the work.”

“You need a fucking hobby. Something that doesn’t have anything to do with rape or murder or psychopaths.”

“Like what? Macrame? Putting together tiny ships in bottles?”

“Maybe.” She smiles at him, and at any other time he’d welcome it but right here and now the kindness stings. It’s sandpaper on his skin scraping blood to the surface. “You spend a lot of time looking at the worst sides of people and it’s wearing you down. Gil can see it. JT and I can see it. Maybe dump the creepy weapon collection and take up knitting or something.”

If only he could convince her it was the opposite: that the work was shoring him up and giving him a foundation more solid than he’d felt in years. Stilling the tremors for the right reasons. “You’d be surprised how many murders have been committed with a pair of knitting needles,” he says. The joke falls flat, but he summons up a fresh smile anyway. “Could we maybe meet for coffee in a couple days?”

“I don’t think so,” she tells him, and it’s a fresh scrape that goes right down to the bone. “You need a real break, Malcolm. Take a week like Gil said and get your priorities straight.”

*

On Malcolm’s list of priorities, sex as a pursuit of pleasure has never ranked terribly high. It’s a lot like recreational drugs: easily available and terrifyingly addictive.

Better, he’d found, to short circuit his mind and his body in other ways to find relief. It’s just as convenient--maybe moreso--to occasionally put the cuffs on his bed to use for something other than keeping him from nightly self-harm.

He arranges a session with a professional. Malcolm’s used him several times before, but never when feeling like this--needy and raw and balancing on a razor’s edge. Pain is its own control. Its own release. Yet Malcolm’s never been so ready to burst; he’s an overripe plum, skin waiting to split.

“You know, you’re not the only dom in my life,” Malcolm says. He’s already giddy, elated. “The last pro I saw was not as, um, handy as you are.” He rolls his shoulder, recalling the impact that had traveled up through the axe handle into his arm. His memory skips forward to way that case had ended--squaring off against Berkhead, that fuckwad of a failure. Still, Malcolm had been enraptured by him as he held the needle to his arm. Could recall the rush of pricking it against his flesh. Staring down the promise of an ending at someone who had practiced the Surgeon’s methods. Amateurish all around, sure, but thrilling nonetheless.

“You’re in a mood tonight, Malcolm. I’m doing well, if you were going to ask. But did I tell you to open your fucking mouth?”

“Sir, you did not. I guess you’re going to have to do something about that.” Malcolm’s restlessness bleeds out through his arms and in the shift of his weight swaying from hip to hip. He tongues at his lip. He doesn’t usually get hard for this sort of thing, but he’s already thickening in his pants when he freezes and asks: “Wait...do you mind if I call you Daddy?”

The dom shrugs as he removes his coat and drops it over the back of Malcolm’s couch. The leather snug on his torso gleams as he sets his gig bag on the table. “Not my favorite, but I’ll permit it. Do we need to renegotiate? Anything else _special_ you’re looking for?” He glances meaningfully at the weapons cabinets.

Malcolm shakes his head no and steps in, welcoming the hand that comes up to meet his jaw and the hard dig of a thumb next to his windpipe. “Just the usual please,” he rasps. His lashes flutter as his breath catches. “Hurt me, Daddy.”

*

The sub drop is harsh in the morning. Malcolm shuffles through his routine with a splitting headache and the promise that it’s going to linger for a while. The cuffs are a weighty jangle at his wrists, a nice reminder along with the other various more pleasurable hurts panging his body of the highlights of the evening.

“I am now ready and willing to create my own reality.”

Malcolm repeats the affirmation as he downs a cup of coffee and rips off a bite of stale croissant. He affixes the card to the wall next to the photo of him and Martin he’s taped there.

“Am I?” he asks it.

He rubs at the buckles on his cuff absently, remembering how hard he’d strained against them when he’d come, and how after, when the pain didn’t stop and had washed over him in waves like flame he’d floated off into that beautiful soft space where everything had become so _clear_. How he’d been so exhausted when the hurt turned to gently cleaning him up, and how the world felt perfectly aligned as he’d been tucked into bed and petted and spoken to in soft, gentle tones.

How once he’d drifted off the dreams still found him and then there was Martin smiling at him, cradling his cheek with a broad hand saying, “Daddy’s here for you, Malcolm.”

And the warmth of the bed beneath him had twisted into that familiar stickiness and the smell of blood and rubbing alcohol was so thick he could taste it. And when he’d turned his head to watch the woman beside him die she wasn’t there--his own eyes were looking back at him, pale and staring, mouth fallen open on a gasp of pleasure and brows pulling together begging for release.

Swearing, Malcolm frees his wrists and tosses the cuffs back towards the bed. His arms immediately feel naked.

“What reality am I supposed to create?” he asks, staring intently at the photo. He doesn’t put the rest of the question into words. The churning uncertainty in his gut wondering precisely what reality it is that he deserves is enough. As is the slice of his shadow cast on the wall, a mimicry of the shape of him.

Either he lives with this new normal and maybe Gil lets him come back to work, or he picks the reins up and sees this madness through. Option three: he goes back to the awful gnawing terror that’s been killing him by inches for years.

“It’s not really an option, is it Martin?” He touches a finger to his father’s smile frozen in time. It’s an illusion of a perfect family moment, just like that sadist had been collecting. The case that had shifted his dreams onto this track. What had Gil said when Dani realized the woman hadn’t fought back for a reason?

_“Screaming or calling for help would’ve put her kids at risk.”_

Malcolm closes his eyes. Imagines himself as the boy in the photo. The one who’d stood in foyer with the night air sweeping in and biting at his ankles. His father standing there in that cherry red sweater turning a reassuring smile on him as the flashing lights from the police cars threw color on the walls.

Had he always been the reason Martin had gone quietly and not self-preservation? Martin had banked a great deal on money getting him free which it ultimately hadn’t, of course, but despite the headlines and the frenzy, well-paid lawyers _had_ kept the Surgeon from the death penalty. From a real prison. He could enjoy a cushy cell at Claremont and a blind eye turned to those other moneyed monsters who since have come to pay him for his services. If he hadn’t put his hands down and looked straight at Malcolm as Gil held the gun on him, would he have been allowed those freedoms?

Certainly Malcolm never would’ve been permitted to visit. To still know his father’s smile and the warmth of his love.

Wouldn't be free to twist it into something to serve his needs. The slightest tremble disturbs the coffee remaining in his cup.

The television going from commercial straight to breaking news saves the cup from being hurled against the wall. Ainsley appears on screen, and behind her Malcolm catches the flash of Gil’s leather jacket and JT’s bulk ducking past the police tape.

He leaves his mug carefully on the counter and pulls his buzzing phone out of his pocket. After his last disastrous visit, he’d stopped expecting Martin to call, so he answers without hesitation. Yet, without looking at the number on the face he knows it’s not Gil seeking his counsel. Malcolm feels that hook tugging in his gut even before he’s greeted with a bubbly, “Malcolm, my boy, it’s been a while!”

Martin sounds _normal_ as if nothing out of the ordinary had transgressed between them and Malcolm hadn’t shown his hand. “Multiple bodies. Sounds messy.”

They’re watching the same news broadcast: both of them fixated on Ainsley outside a warehouse reporting on the grisly scene inside as the wind does its best to undo her perfect hair.

“I wouldn’t know,” Malcolm says, distracted. It doesn’t escape him that he’s doing the exact same thing as Martin is: trying to elicit clues in the microexpressions on Ainsley's face and by the body language of the cops milling around near the cordoned off area. He’s got one advantage at least in that Martin doesn’t really know his own daughter. 

“You’re not there?”

“I don’t want to talk about it, Martin.”

“I see. Should I call back at a better time?”

A better time. Sourness rises in Malcolm’s throat. He should hang up and call his therapist. He should walk away from the hunt for his own past and stop trying to win at a game that has no positive outcome.

Instead, he clicks off the television and finds himself running the pads of his fingers down his throat towards the ache of bruises pressed into his collarbones. He closes his eyes, trying not to speculate on the lay of the bodies. It’s too little information. 

Opening his mouth, a request pours out: Don’t. Stay on the line and talk about something, _anything_ else.

The surprise and joy in his father’s voice feels like turning his face to the sun, and he listens absently to Martin natter on about his time in boarding school. Less raw, less low, as he climbs back up from the drop he can sense the shadows gathering dark as pitch, cast into being by the glow of each word rolling off Martin’s tongue and the desperation hidden in them.

*

The box returns.

The chill of the floor beneath the soles of Malcolm's feet is cold as ice. He’s rooted in place.

He screams at it, begging it not to open and pleading with himself not to reach for the lid. He can’t stop the forward motion of his arms, the gravity of the box pulling him in as if it’s ready to devour him alive.

Behind him is warmth. The comfort of a soft red sweater. “Don’t open it,” Martin tells him.

There’s the click of hard candy against his teeth, and for a moment he thinks he might awaken, but then the lid hinges open and he can’t look away from the body curled inside. Still breathing. Still warm. Wearing institutional white and draped in a soft cream cardigan.

The box stretches impossibly wide as he crawls into it, slotting neatly into the space behind the curve of his father’s back.

Malcolm breathes in the scent of him and knows only darkness.

*

“I’ve been giving it some thought, the thing you asked of me,” Martin says delicately. There’s an undercurrent of anger under the softness of his tone. “Is it truly the price for you to visit me.”

Malcolm doesn’t answer. He turns onto the path towards the boathouse and dodges a pair of joggers with strollers. He's not heading anywhere in particular, walking purely to keep busy.

“I miss you,” Martin says, and this is genuine. Or as genuine as it can be since the yearning is rooted in needing to reaffirm his sense of self in Malcolm’s presence. To see his legacy standing in front of him in a nice suit with an aura reeking of potential.

“Malcolm, please say something.”

He can’t. If he does, Martin will hear it in the shape of his breath that the current goes both ways. That for the time being, the reality is that he’s shackled them together.

He hangs up before he can say, “I miss you, too,” and his hand trembles briefly as he dials Gil.

“It’s been two weeks, please. If you’re stuck on that botched murder suicide, I can help!”

“You know you sound like a junkie.”

He tips his head back and squints at the sky. A breeze ruffles through the trees, another handful of leaves ripping free from thinning branches to scatter across the park. “Please. Just let me take a look at Edrisa’s report.”

Gil’s hand muffles the speaker briefly. Malcolm can practically hear his teeth grinding. When his voice returns to the line, it’s terse. “Do you know I ran into your therapist the other day? Well, guess what she told me--oh, surprise, you haven’t been to see her in _months._”

“Has it been that long?” Malcolm knows the breezy tone isn’t going to cut it, but neither will the truth. He bites his tongue and nearly doubles over, stomach filling with pins. His grip on his phone is so hard his joints ache.

“You make it to your appointments twice a week for the next three weeks and you can come back. Promise me you’ll talk to her, Malcolm.”

He does and he tries. He really, really tries.

But the look on Dr. Le Deux’s face when he finally admits to dreaming about his father fucking him is too much. And when she’d asked the classic, “How does that make you feel?” and two sessions later he spits out the truth, well—

He’s not sure he’ll ever be able to look her in the eye again.

*

In Malcolm's new morning ritual he doesn’t seek out a new card after taking his pills, he just taps the one on the wall like a reminder, an unfinished task.

To create his reality he needs to go back to Claremont without ceding ground or pushing too hard. He needs to find a way to ensure he remains in control.

And the fear…. The fear needs to stay with someone who deserves to live with it. Malcolm isn’t as convinced that he can make that stick, but he needs to try. _Needs to._ If he can't seal it around his father and lock the lid tight, then what? He looks at his hand and the lines crossing his palm.

Malcolm doesn’t act on the impulse immediately. He spends a few more days trying to summon the courage to see his therapist again and holds it together mostly by going to the Met and walking the archives. There might be something to the idea of a hobby, he thinks, wandering through collections that span centuries. He could study the art of restoration, maybe.

He might enjoy the work, unlocking the secrets of masterpieces hidden behind aging varnish instead of breaking down canvases made of flesh and bone.

Ainsley thinks it sounds like a wonderful idea. So much so that she apparently tells their mother, who raises her wine glass to him at dinner and says, “I’m just happy you’re putting all that consulting nonsense behind you.” She spears a dark red cherry with the gleaming tines of her salad fork. Juice like blood runs from the flesh as she neatly slices it in two.

“It’s only an idea, mother,” he says, already souring on the prospect in the same way that the salad course is newly unappealing. “And technically it would still be consulting.”

“You know what I meant. Don’t be smart.”

Ainsley throws him a silent apology, sorry that she’d let it slip. He lowers his lashes, deflecting the look. It isn’t her fault. Their mother will forever excel at twisting them against one another for information. Particularly as only one of them is really ever on good terms with her at any one time.

Attacking his own salad, Malcolm changes the subject. “So, how goes the charity work?” he asks, flashing a broad smile and gesturing with the point of his knife.

If Ainsley or their mother notice the way he’s holding it, they pretend not to.


	4. heart shaped box

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It costs the same amount as last time to turn Claremont’s cameras off and buy him the three hours of privacy that Martin’s most important patients command.
> 
> The tea service he carries in? That costs him a few thousand extra.

Fear begins as the shadow of a suggestion. A flicker of thought. A potential. It lives in the shape of a box and in a still-warm body. It stares at him with wet, frightened eyes and though he can touch it--_Be gentle, Malcolm..._\--it requires discipline to look at head on.

He calls Ainsley. He has brunch with his mother. He emails Gil. He even schedules a series of appointments with his therapist. He sees to each task like going down a checklist before he circles around inevitably to Martin, over and over in his sleep and eventually when he’s wide awake and ready to go back.

It costs the same amount as last time to turn Claremont’s cameras off and buy him the three hours of privacy that Martin’s most important patients command.

The tea service he carries in? That costs him a few thousand extra.

“So this is how it is,” Martin remarks. His stare is direct and unwavering as Malcolm enters. 

He’s not mad he’s just disappointed, Malcolm thinks wryly as he makes a beeline for the small card table that’s been placed in the room. It’s draped in white with a flour sack dish towel making do in lieu of a linen tablecloth. He carefully sets the tray down, and slides an already-steaming cup of tea in front of Martin. He places the other cup in front of the chair waiting for him. His mother would be aghast at his lack of manners--to serve tea already poured and tinged with a splash of milk is shamefully rude. Extenuating circumstances, this.

“I wouldn’t outright agree to your terms and so you decide to treat me like one of my own victims.”

Malcolm takes his seat and picks up the cup and saucer. He returns Martin’s gaze keenly. Beneath the surface he’s electric, skittering, full of restless anticipatory things trying to claw through his skin and howl their triumph. Can Martin see it? “That would be terribly cruel of me,” he says glibly. “Sugar?”

“You know you were never exactly a kind child, Malcolm, but I would never have called you cruel.” With a pinched expression, Martin picks up the cup waiting on his side of the tray. He doesn’t reach for the sugar.

“You _had_ said you’d given it enough thought that you were willing to try.”

“Continuing to see you is very important to me, Malcolm. And you were right, I might be your father but my morals are...flexible,” he looks away. A muscle in his jaw jumps. “But like this? My boy, it’s particularly appalling. I suppose that’s why you’ve chosen it.”

“Well how would you do it? How did you imagine you’d fuck me?”

Martin fiddles with the cup and takes a sip that leaves him scowling. He hesitates before giving in and adding a chunk of sugar. He swirls his spoon to hasten its melting and the crunch of it sounds very loud in the quiet of the room.

“I told you how I dreamed it, Martin. It’s only fair you do me the same courtesy.” Malcolm pictures Martin’s fingers taut on a scalpel instead of the slim silver handle of a spoon. He imagines the tip of the blade pressed to his skin to draw a perfect shivering bead of red to the surface. “Do you want me to remind you? How I’m laying there naked on my back in a pool of blood--”

Abruptly Martin’s gaze lifts, and it carries its own sharp and gleaming edge, as crisp and perfect as the gilded lip of the cup. It neatly severs the stream of Malcolm’s words. “I would _never_ want you on your back, Malcolm,” Martin says.

“No?”

“Whores belong on their backs,” he says, a faint snarl rising in his tone. He gives the spoon in his cup another swirl before tapping it lightly and setting it aside. He corrects the angle with a nudge, a gesture that’s not so much obsessive as it is indicative of his need to control something about the situation. He draws in a deep breath and releases it slowly. “No child of mine is a whore.”

When Malcolm adds a lump of sugar to his tea, he sucks the spoon clean like a lollipop. If it were his mother seated across from him, she’d roll her eyes and wonder where she’d gone wrong. He blows on the surface of his tea. Martin though, can’t help himself from watching and the faint tightening of his lips tells Malcolm rather a lot. Chiefly, that he is underestimating the depths of his own depravity and just how much thought he’s really given the prospect.

“On my side,” Malcolm says, hazarding a guess. He traces the tip of his tongue against the point of a tooth the instant he knows he’s right. He sips his tea and abandons his manners entirely to lick the gilt silver rim of the cup, a lewd drag of the flat of his tongue flashing pink before he raises his lashes and grins at Martin. “With all the talk of boarding school…you’ve decided it would be easiest if you were behind me. You don’t want to penetrate me or risk looking me in the eye as you enjoy the feel of my body, so you’ve decided you’ll consent to sliding wet between my thighs and a reach around.”

“Something tells me that won’t satisfy you,” Martin says bitterly, raising his tea. He takes a quick swallow. He moves to set the cup back on the saucer but changes his mind, draining it in one go and leaving it clattering empty between them like an accusation.

Malcolm takes an equally performative swallow. The heat slips down his throat to join the sizzle in his gut. Oh, if he could surge across the table, claw his hands into Martin’s hair and bite a kiss on those lips, it would taste like heaven. “Would it satisfy you? Be honest, _dad._”

By now Malcolm’s put it all on black betting that it won’t. Martin’s been sitting with the shadow of it the same as him. The idea eating through him like maggots, a foulness wriggling through his soul day and night, a grotesquery that he can’t look away from. A fear and a desire he can’t banish now that he’s given it space in his skull.

His son--_his own son_\--wants to fuck him so badly he’s risking nearly everything to get his way. Martin’s own flesh and blood shaped roughly into the same trim build he’d known twenty five years past when he’d been at his prime and new to killing. If he seizes the chance, it’d be like fucking himself and the memory of his victims all at once. Irresistible.

And like a narcissistic cherry on top sits the chance to put an indelible stamp on his legacy, the soul that will live on past him. A corruption that might--_just might_\--turn that soul to the same wicked path as his own. Martin’s surely calculated it and considered the angles. The odds. Begun obsessing over the idea of paving a way into the history books, father and son together, with a string of artfully broken bodies fitting together like a jigsaw puzzle made of sex and murder. 

Cracks appear in Malcolm’s control, too eager maybe to show Martin just how clever he’s been. “You should know: there’s nothing in the tea,” he says, leaning forward with an earnest grin. The cup and saucer in his lap rattles. Idly he wonders when he’d begun to clutch it so firmly. “I haven’t dosed you. Scout’s honor. Don’t bother pointing out that I was never a scout, it’s a turn of phrase and you follow.”

Martin looks unconvinced, but then his expression drifts sideways towards concern. He goes to the edge of his chair and gently lifts the china out from Malcolm’s clawed hand. He abandons it on the tray and reaches out to place a hand light on Malcolm’s elbow. “Malcolm, what have you done?”

“I think you know,” Malcolm says, grin widening to split his face in two. He raises his arm to read his watch. Or he tries to. Seems he’s mistimed when the dose would hit him by what, ten minutes? What a shame. His head starts to loll, heavy on his neck, and his arm slips down to dangle at his side. He wants to laugh, the ripple of it catching somewhere behind his ribs before it can bubble free. “I’m going to lose most of my motor control now, Martin. I hope you don’t mind.”

Martin rises and catches Malcolm’s face between his hands, tips it up to gauge his pupils. “What did you take? This isn’t ketamine,” Martin says, finding Malcolm’s pulse and stopping him from listing off the chair.

“No ketamine,” Malcolm agrees. The cocktail in his blood is really hitting him now, and an apology wells up, drawing with it a confusing sting of tears and a slurring giggle. “Sorry, but I wanted-- I want to feel it when it happens.”

“Malcolm, what did you take?” Martin asks again, firmly and calmly in his doctor’s tone. When he doesn’t get an answer he gathers Malcolm up into his arms, easily carrying him to the bed and laying him there. Swiftly and efficiently he clears Malcolm’s mouth and rips his sleeve open to better take his pulse.

Martin shoots a look to the door. The fear is wound so thickly around him it’s a black smothering fog, and Malcolm is swept up into his father’s dawning realization of the situation he’s been trapped in. Cameras off, tea service--Malcolm’s paid enough that no one will come running if either of them shouts for help. The panic crescendos when he looks back at Malcolm, whites of his eyes full of a raw and furious terror that his son might have dosed himself with something fatal. That he might have chosen to die and rob Martin of his second greatest achievement. To leave him with a death that will add to his notoriety but not his magnum opus.

To be fair, Malcolm had considered the idea, but he’s not broken in that way any more than he’s lacking in empathy. He’s never wanted to sink into death, only to flirt with the thrilling edges of it, the crisp white overload of nerves where there’s no room left for shadows. Into the metallic stink of warm blood and the comfort of bruises.

He finds he’s correctly anticipated each move Martin makes from here in sequence: first looking to the tea service and the silver that’s too soft to hope to wrench the tether from the wall, next patting down Malcolm’s pockets in case there’s something hidden and useful, and then, when the pulse under his fingers remains slow but steady, the way Martin studies him anew as the terror shifts back towards that writhing awfulness, that greasy ugly yearning that Malcolm knows very, very well now.

“You fucking manipulative little shit,” Martin hisses. He drops Malcolm’s wrist like it’s a red hot poker. His trembling hand curls into a fist. But he’s never struck Malcolm before and he’s not going to start now.

Malcolm’s fingers twitch in sympathetic response. He has enough control to part his mouth, to roll his tongue over his lip and leave it glistening. To let his head list to the side and stare at the empty space beside him. To feel phantom heat pouring from his back as he breathes out in a murmuring rasp: “I regret to inform you that your son is a whore, Doctor Whitly.” He blinks slowly, eyes going heavy lidded as the smile lingers at the corners of his mouth.

“No!” Martin cries, and lunges for him. He refuses to let Malcolm turn away like the woman he keeps meeting in his dreams. To let his son mirror that nameless, faceless victim. He twists Malcolm’s head upright, measures his breath with the back of a hand, and crams a pillow beside Malcolm’s cheek to keep him in place. He gives it a small pat before he steps back, teeth scraping over his lip in indecision.

“Oh, my boy,” he says, pacing back and forth at the edge of the bed like a restless lion, teeth bared, sneaking glances at Malcolm’s prone body and quietly furious at both of them that he can’t look away for long. He hates that he can’t deny he wants what’s Malcolm’s presented him, the ruinous gift of it. The tether slithers along the floor. “My brilliant, stupid boy.”

“All yours, dad,” Malcolm whispers, little more than a slur of vowels. He’s floating but not disassociating, he was too careful with the chemicals to risk that. This is the leading edge of the high that comes with waiting for that first blow to land, even if it’s likely to be delivered here as a caress. The skittering under his skin is pure excitement now. “No cops.”

The cardigan slides to the floor in a soft whump and Martin stretches out his neck as he reminds Malcolm that he’d never wanted this. Maybe not. But with Malcolm prone and vulnerable and entirely at his mercy, he does now. The wanting crests and crashes like a wave, and Martin’s fingers shake with need as he wrestles with the front of his jumpsuit. He eels out of the sleeves and strips off his undershirt, tying the arms around his waist to hide the belt still tethering him to the wall. His shoulders are broad, muscle thick in his arms as he leans over Malcom and begins to unbutton the front of his son’s shirt with far more care. He holds Malcolm’s gaze with an intensity that burns him alive.

“I won’t hurt you,” Martin promises as he lifts open Malcolm’s shirt. He even thinks he means it. “I won’t, Malcolm. You have to believe me.”

The air cool on Malcolm’s chest triggers his skin to gooseflesh. The drugs aren’t supposed to have psychoactive effects, and maybe they don’t, but he feels like it’s more than fine twill made to measure that’s Martin’s peeled back. When his father’s fingers trail the edge of his ribs, they slip across his naked bones, waiting for the right moment to rip away the flap of muscle holding together the cavern of his guts.

A blink and he’s whole again, shivering as Martin undresses him piece by piece, no longer bothering to look away and simply feasting on the skin he bares in slow inches. “Look at you…. Oh, son, you aren’t eating enough,” he says, clucking his tongue. His knuckles drift down the flat of Malcolm’s belly towards the jut of his hipbone. The featherlight touch leaves Malcolm aching to arch up into it to beg for a scrape of nails to stripe him red. “You’re going to lose muscle tone if you aren’t careful.”

Malcolm couldn’t care less about his physique. He doesn’t need to be able to pass a PFT; the agency is never going to welcome him back. And if this leads where he thinks and levels him out, he’ll put in the time to ensure he’s fit enough for Gil’s team. He’s already made the appointments and the promises. No matter what Martin is thinking right now, Malcolm won’t become the monster looming above him. He won’t turn to murder. Gil had sent him here the first time trusting he wouldn’t, and he’s not going to betray that trust in the way that he’s betrayed Martin.

It’s risking a lot on the profile he’s built for both of them, but he takes that risk with every case. He trusts his own judgement...mostly. Has to believe this won’t push Martin from seething lust and squirming unease to the hot fury of destruction. Malcolm is here creating his own reality. He is taking control by giving up control. The solutions he seeks are clear to him because he is being his authentic self.

And he’s learning to be okay with the shame of being a very different sort of monster. The sort that breathes out a sigh when he watches helplessly as Martin tugs the jumpsuit down and eases the zipper past his belt. The kind whose belly curls with lust as Martin slides a hand inside to grab his cock. 

If Martin’s already hard, Malcolm can’t tell. It’s a particular sort of torture that he can’t lift his head to look or see anything beyond the play of muscle in Martin’s forearm as he grips himself. Is this what he’d done with his victims: idly toying with his cock after he’d stripped them naked to watch the blood spread, edging himself between cutting into flesh and breaking bones….

Malcolm shudders, limbs faintly twitching, his own cock filling out again until its resting hot and thick against his belly. He entertains a flicker of uncertainty. There’s the chance Martin will surprise him and reject the lure of seeing himself reflected in Malcolm’s eyes. That he’ll roll Malcolm to his side and fuck him Oxford style after all.

He doesn’t. He lifts Malcolm’s knees to part them and lay them open and flat, splaying him like a butterfly. Martin smooths his hand over his beard as his breath slices to ribbons from the rush.

“Men aren’t particularly to my taste,” he remarks, kneeling now between the spread of Malcolm’s legs. His gaze flicks up briefly to Malcolm’s. His smile borders on apologetic. “But I’m sure you know that.”

Malcolm manages a quiet hum of agreement.

“Not to say I haven’t dabbled. One should always try something a few times before dismissing it, isn’t that right?” His hands stutter up the insides of Malcolm’s legs, breath catching before his thumbs stroke the taut stretch of tendon at the peak of Malcolm’s thighs. It’s clearly far less difficult than he’d feared to touch his son like this, and each caress grows bolder, more tender and more cutting. “But this is about you, isn’t it, my boy, and you enjoy cock quite a bit more than I do.”

“I do,” Malcolm says dreamily. He’s not picky, really, when it comes to the gender of his occasional sexual partners, but there’s something nice about the weight of a dick in his mouth, of having his ass crammed full and his body used until he’s left boneless and sloppy. In fact, he’s already lubed up and slick inside, uncomfortably so. It’s going to be so fucking good when Martin gets over the pretense of restraint and probes a finger inside to find him wet and ready. His belly quivers.

“Wait...something’s missing,” Martin says, and shuffles off the bed to go to the radio and flick it on. _Witchcraft_ is just starting, and he momentarily closes his eyes to sing along, his mouth curving at the corners. “That sly come hither stare...that strips my conscious bare….”

When Martin comes back to the bed he’s newly animated, alive in the way that Malcolm is, the manic glint in his eye making them mirror images of one another when their gazes catch and hold. “In the early days, I’d dance with them, you know,” Martin says, falling over Malcolm and putting a palm to his face. The press of his cock sends a jolt of lust up Malcolm’s spine. The smell of soap rises light and sweet from his skin. “Before I understood what my work needed to say. Oh, they were so beautiful, those girls, light as a feather even when they were sedated.”

“What am I, dad?” Malcolm mumbles, head tipping to smear his open mouth again Martin’s palm.

“I should hate you for this,” Martin breathes, but there’s pride in the pale glint of his eyes, at this trap built up around him masterfully. His thumb sweeps across Malcolm’s lips, the edge of it running across the row of his teeth. “My boy, you’re a different sort of beautiful.”

Around them, Sinatra croons: _My heart says yes indeed in me...proceed with what you’re leading me to...._

“I want-- I want you to hurt me,” Malcolm mumbles, naming his truth aloud. He tries to push his tongue out, to lick at the pad of Martin’s thumb.

“Never,” Martin vows, even with the new darkness joining the rest of his sins. Slowly, carefully, he kisses Malcolm’s pliant mouth and works him open, and that hook in Malcolm’s belly carves through his spine as Martin pushes into him slick and easy and sweet. Martin never looks away, and it’s a different sort of hurt than Malcolm is used to.

He wants to _move_, his limbs straining feebly and failing to do more than twitch as he tries to reach up and cling to Martin’s back and feel the muscles working there. He aches to press his thighs tight to Martin’s and buck up against the plunge of the cock splitting him wide. He makes faint, hungry sounds begging for Martin to go harder, _deeper_. He trembles, dizzy and wretched, desperate to slip his tongue into the heat of Martin’s mouth and taste him again. 

To be held by the wrists or the neck is so different than this useless straining against dead muscles that won’t respond. Being a passive partner has never been Malcolm’s thing. He’s always needed to be put in his place. Malcolm groans and closes his eyes, lets the smell of rubbing alcohol rise from the shadows as his body moves solely by the force of Martin fucking into him. 

“Daddy,” he murmurs. “Use me.”

“One day,” Martin promises, and his shudder echoes deliciously into Malcolm. He pushes in, deep as he can, splitting Malcolm in two, filling him full. His beard whispers against Malcolm’s neck and the shape of his words are just as soft. “My sweet boy, I promise you, we’ll find your dark-haired woman and we’ll kill her together. We can make it happen.

“I’ll keep her for you, just like the woman in the box, and I’ll drain her for you...pour all that blood beneath you,” Martin goes on, his hands sliding under Malcolm to cradle him. His hips move with more urgency, driving him deeper into Malcolm until there’s the crude sound of flesh slapping against flesh. “I can teach you exactly how to bleed her the way you want. And if you need this from me again, my boy, just like this--”

“Yes,” Malcolm moans. In his mind, the bed cracks against the wall. Plaster rains down like flakes of ash. The shadow is beneath him and above him, a dark devouring that he can look at from a distance. His is stained with something far easier to manage than that nameless terror of the secrets buried in his past. This ugly yearning is something he can face and feed.

Slowly, he manages to twist his palms to the bed and turn his face towards the drag of Martin’s cheek against his own. It’s so good, the push of Martin’s cock inside him. The rattle of the tether against the wall and the scrape of the belt against his skin. The soft tickling of Martin’s beard.

_Gentle, Malcolm,_ he tells himself. _You don’t want to hurt it._

“I love you so much,” Martin says, and Malcolm loses himself hot and sticky in the space between their flesh.

He drifts for a time in beautiful clarity, able to feel everything even when it’s too much and stinging. Soaks up each word Martin smears against his skin and each shaking kiss.

He is powerful. He creates everything around him.

He’s regaining the use of his limbs by the time Martin has escaped the illusion of needing to be precious with him. When he’s biting at the slope of Malcolm’s neck and tonguing the marks left by his teeth. He claws bruises into the wing of Malcolm’s hip and fucks him with desperate, jerking thrusts that have turned sticky and dragging. A fiery, gritty hurt that promises to leave him raw and wincing for days. He turns his head to invite Martin to clamp down harder and his hand trembles in his peripheral as Martin’s teeth scrape up to the hinge of his jaw and his lips slide to find Malcolm’s.

Malcolm can kiss back this time to a degree, and Martin fits a hand at Malcolm’s throat to feel the feeble working of his tongue at its root. The touch after a moment turns reverent--a sweeping, shivering caress that screams triumphantly _I made this_. Malcolm arches and echoes the sentiment with a soft moan.

Between blinks there’s the spill of dark hair beside him on the bed. The spreading crimson. The shining eyes that plead with him. And when Martin gasps and falls on top of Malcolm, sweating and sated, a despairing laugh comes pouring out of Malcolm in fits and starts, because he sees her so clearly now, for the first time. The sum of her.

“Of course,” he murmurs, reaching out for the trailing edge of his mother’s red dress as the stink of middling vodka spreads towards him.

The wheezing hysteria leaves him trembling all over, shaking in his father’s blood-stained arms.

“My boy. My beautiful boy. I had no idea how much I needed this,” Martin whispers, hands sliding over Malcolm claiming and hungry. He bleeds shadows as he peels himself away and Malcolm follows his gaze to bear triumphant witness at everything they’ve wrought together.

*

When the clock ticks towards the end of their allotted time together Martin sits him on the edge of the bed and helps him set himself to rights. He ties Malcolm’s tie and slides the knot up snugly to his throat. He fixes Malcolm’s collar and the drift of his hand down Malcolm’s front is familiar and without hesitation. Malcolm can’t help but lean into the touch like a dog. Above them, the little red lights turn on again.

“There you go,” Martin says, smiling gently. “Perfect again. When will I see you next?”

“I think I’m gonna have quite a few therapy sessions to attend,” Malcolm tells him. He scrapes his tongue with his teeth, mouth like cotton from the drugs. He tests his motor control by curling his fingers into a fist and releasing it. He lifts his hand in front of his face and holds it there. “I’m trying to get back to work.”

“Is that so.” Martin studiously avoids looking at the tea service, but the implication is clear: so is he.

“You know what they say about idle hands,” Malcolm says, wiggling his fingers before rising unsteadily. He sways a bit on his feet and Martin touches him low on the back until he straightens. At the end of the hall, a guard comes around the corner, keys jangling. “Looks like our time is officially up, Doctor Whitly.”

“I’ll be thinking of you.”

“I’m counting on it,” Malcolm says. 

“You okay, Mr. Bright?” the guard asks on his approach.

“I’m fine,” Malcolm says, stumbling and giddy as he exits. “More than fine.”

*

For a while, Malcolm’s sleep is dreamless. It doesn’t last, but it’s better. Much better. The questions are easier to sit with. The terror is always at arm’s length or further. The box is closed and quiet and he can watch it with detached curiosity even when he can’t pull himself away from it to wake.

*

He reads new affirmations and attends family dinner diligently. Enjoys long meandering walks in the park and hours in the Met archives. He sits through endless grueling therapy sessions that rip him raw all over again in ways he hasn’t had to endure since he was a boy. Between it all he takes his father’s calls and ruthlessly measures the increasingly desperate tone in Martin’s voice whenever their time draws to its end. It keeps him focused enough to approach the tasks of the day, one after another, to prove that he is in control of himself.

Eventually he can look Dr. Le Deux in the eye again and pretend he doesn’t still dream about fucking his father and jerk off in the shower remembering the feel of Martin’s mouth on his throat. Eventually she writes him a letter that he forwards on dutifully to Gil. And eventually, when he gets the call he’s been waiting for--homicide, a _weird_ one--he’s elated and relieved.

Gil welcomes him back to the fold with a tight hug that goes even tighter and it kickstarts a glimmer of something light and wonderful in Malcolm’s chest.

“Looking good, kid,” he says, and Malcolm ducks the attempt to ruffle his hair. 

“Found yourself a new hobby?” Dani asks. She holds up the tape for him to duck under and gives him a calculating once-over.

Malcolm’s attention is already ahead on the body waiting for him. “You could say that,” he murmurs.

“Is it weird?” she asks, falling into step beside him. Almost immediately she shakes her head and says, “Nevermind, I don’t really want to know.”

“Probably for the best,” Malcolm tells her. Beneath his clothes he can still map the bites and bruises Martin left on him even though they’ve long since faded. He grins and shrugs and she crooks a smile in return that says she might never stop thinking he’s a freak, but she’s missed him. 

He can hear the news vans arriving. Soon, Martin will call, needing to hear his voice, more desperate than ever to talk about murder. And before long Malcolm will tap into his trust fund again to go back to Claremont and strip down, take what he needs and carve out the answers he wants in return. Eventually Martin will help him puzzle out what’s real and not in the spaces between dreams and memory.

“I see what you mean when you said weird,” he breathes, approaching the body dangling from the rafters. He can appreciate good work when he sees it. Moreso now than ever, perhaps.

Gil moves to stand beside him. “This seem like a message to you?”

“Our killer definitely has something to say,” Malcolm agrees. His pocket buzzes. He declines the call. Everything now proceeds on his terms.

“Think you can make heads or tails of it?”

“One way or another I’ll figure it out,” he promises. He might need Martin’s help, but Martin will be even more eager to give it now. He fishes a candy out of his pocket and smiles before he pops it in his mouth.

“Good,” Gil says, and claps him on the back, squeezes him on the shoulder with unfailing warmth and reassurance. “Glad to have you back, kid.”

He wouldn’t be, if he knew, but Malcolm’s shadow stays tight in its box, locked away with Martin and his festering lusts. Gil needs him more sincerely than his father ever will, and Malcolm’s hand remains still. His heart steady.

“Glad to be back,” he says, and prepares himself for the hunt.

**Author's Note:**

> Read more of my [Prodigal Son fics](https://archiveofourown.org/works?utf8=%E2%9C%93&commit=Sort+and+Filter&work_search%5Bother_tag_names%5D=Prodigal+Son+%28TV+2019%29&user_id=ponderosa121), or talk to me about this twink getting wrecked on Twitter [@ponderosa121](https://twitter.com/ponderosa121) or on Discord in [Prodigal Son Trash](https://discord.gg/fQaRgBD).


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